Crabwalk

figures larger than life. The perpetrator, however, soon sank into obscurity; even Mother, when she was a child and was called Tulla, never heard anything about a murder and a murderer, only fairy tales of a gleaming white ship that took loads of merry folk on long and short cruises for an organization calling itself Strength through Joy.

* * *

While i was still a foot-dragging student living off the generosity of others, I attended the lectures given by Professor Hollerer at Berlins Technical University. He captivated the overflowing crowd in the lecture hall with his piercing birdlike voice. His subject matter was the dramatists Kleist, Grabbe, and Buchner, all geniuses on the run. One of his courses was called Between Classicism and Modernism. I liked hanging out in the Waitzkeller among the young literary types and still younger girls, booksellers' apprentices. Here unpolished literary attempts were read aloud and critiqued. At the Literary Colloquiums branch on Carmerstrasse I even took a course based on the American notion of teaching creative writing. A good dozen promising fellow students, some with actual talent. I didn't have the right stuff, I was told firmly by one of the instructors, who was trying to prod us beginners with topics like Spiritual Help Line into taking epic leaps. The best I could hope to produce was trashy novels. But now he has hauled me out of the pit into which he cast me back then, declaring that my botched life has its origin in a unique event, an exemplary event, an event worthy of being told.

Some of the talents from that era are already dead. Two or three of them made a name for themselves. My old instructor, however, seems to have written himself dry; otherwise he would hardly have pressed me into service as a ghostwriter. But I've had enough of this crab-walk. I keep getting stuck. I tell him its not worth it. Both of those fellows were nutcases, one no better than the other. Sacrificing himself to give his people an example of heroic resistance — don't make me laugh. The Jews weren't one iota better off after the murder. On the contrary! Terror was the law of the land. And two years later, when the Jew Herszel Grynszpan shot the German diplomat Ernst von Rath in Paris, the Nazis' response was the Night of Broken Glass. And what good did another martyr do the Nazis, I wonder. Well, all right, they named a ship after him.

And already I'm back on track. Not because the old man is breathing down my neck, but because Mother has never eased up. Even when I was a boy in Schwerin, where I had to hop around like a puppet on a string in my blue shirt and neckerchief every time some dedication took place, she would hammer away at me: “That sea there full of ice, and them poor little ones all floating head down. You've got to write about it. That much you owe us, seeing as how you were one of the lucky ones and survived. Someday I'll tell you the whole story, exactly what happened, and you'll write it all down…”

But I wasn't willing. No one wanted to hear the story, not here in the West, and certainly not in the East. For decades the Gustlqff and its awful fate were taboo, on a pan-German basis, so to speak. Yet Mother continued to badger me, now by secret courier. When I dropped out of the university and went to work for Springer, listing fairly far to the right, she saw an opportunity even there: “That man's a revanchist. He sides with us expellees. He'll print it in installments, for however many weeks it takes…”

And later, when the 'Tageszeitung and my various other left-leaning headstands were making me dizzy, Aunt Jenny would invite me to join her for asparagus and new potatoes at Habel's near Roseneck and serve up Mothers admonitions for dessert: “My girlfriend Tulla still places great hopes in you. She wants me to let you know that it's your filial duty to tell the whole world…”

But I didn't let myself be pressured. All those years when I was freelancing, writing long pieces for nature publications, on organic vegetables and the effects of acid rain on Germany's forests, for instance, also breast- beating stuff along the lines of “Auschwitz: Never Again,” I managed to leave the circumstances of my birth out of it — until that fateful day at the end of January '96 when I first clicked my way to the right-wing extremist Stormfront home page, and from there followed some Gustloff links until I landed on the www. blutzeuge.de site and made the acquaintance of the Comrades of Schwerin.

Took some initial notes. Was amazed. Wanted to understand how this provincial celebrity, who owed his fame to those four shots in Davos, had all of a sudden begun to attract surfers. The site was skillfully done. Photos of key locales in Schwerin, interspersed with little come-ons: “Would you like to learn more about our martyr? Should we offer his story piece by piece?”

What's all this “we” business? This “comrades” business? I was willing to bet that the creator of the site was flying solo out there in cyberspace. One mind was the dung heap where these seeds were sending up Nazi-brown shoots, and one alone. What this fellow had posted on the Net about Strength through Joy looked attractive, and wasn't even all that idiotic. Snapshots of vacationers smiling on board ship, or cavorting on the beaches of Rugen Island.

Of course Mother didn't really know much about all this. She always referred to Strength through Joy as KDF, for “Kraft durch Freude.” As a ten-year-old she had seen bits and pieces in Fox's Movietone News, the newsreel shown at the Langfuhr cinema, among them the maiden voyage of “our KDF boat.” And Father and Mother Pokriefke had actually had a chance to take a cruise on the Gustloff in the summer of '39, he as a worker and Party member, she as a member of the Nazi Women's League. A little group from Danzig — at that time still a free state — was allowed to participate under a special dispensation for German citizens abroad — in the nick of time, so to speak. The destination in mid-August was the Norwegian fjords, too late in the season for the bonus of midnight sun.

During my childhood, whenever Mother brought up her inevitable Sunday topic of the ships sinking, she would always emphasize her fathers enthusiasm for a Norwegian folk-dancing group in colorful costumes who had performed on the sundeck of the KDF ship. “And my mama just loved that swimming pool, with them colorful pictures all done in tiles — that was where those poor naval auxiliary girls was squeezed in like sardines until that Russki blew the poor young things to bits with his second torpedo…”

But at this point the Gustloff hasn't even had its keel laid, let alone been launched. Besides, I have to backtrack, because right after the fatal shots were fired, the judges, prosecutor, and defense attorney in the Swiss canton of Graubunden began to prepare for the trial of David Frankfurter. The proceedings were supposed to take place in Chur. Since the perpetrator had confessed, a speedy trial could be expected. But in Schwerin solemn observances were being organized, on orders from the very highest level, to be staged as soon as the body was brought back, and designed to leave a lasting impression on the memory of the German Volk.

What a scene a few well-aimed shots had set in motion: columns of goose-stepping storm troopers, aisles of honor, color guards, uniformed wreath and torch bearers. To muffled drumbeats, the Wehrmacht marched by at a funereal pace, past sidewalks lined with residents of Schwerin, who were paralyzed by grief or merely craning their necks to see the spectacle.

Before his assassination, this Party member had been largely unknown in his native Mecklenburg, just one regional Gruppenleiter among many in the Nazi organizations abroad; but in death Wilhelm Gustloff was inflated into a figure who seemed to render several speakers helpless as they searched for comparable greatness; all that occurred to them was Horst Wessel, that top martyr who had written and lent his name to a song always played and sung on official occasions — of which there were plenty — right after “Deutschland, Deutschland, uber alles”: “Raise high the flag…”

In Davos the solemnities took place on a more modest scale. The resorts Protestant church, actually a mere chapel, set certain limitations. In front of the altar, draped with a swastika flag, stood the coffin. On top of it lay the deceaseds honorary dagger, armband, and SA cap, arranged in a still life. Some two hundred Party members from all the cantons had gathered. In addition, Swiss citizens, both outside and inside the chapel, were there to express their views. The mountains forming a backdrop.

Portions of the rather simple memorial service held in this resort famous the world over for its TB sanatoria were broadcast to all German radio stations. Announcers called upon the listeners to hold their breath. But in all the commentaries and in all the speeches delivered later in other locations, David Frankfurters name was not mentioned once. From then on he was referred to only as the “treacherous Jewish murderer.” When the opposition tried to force-feed the sickly medical student into a hero, placing him because of his Serbian origins on a pedestal as the “Yugoslav Wilhelm Tell,” Swiss patriots objected in outraged stage German, but these attempts